Citi, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and Royal Bank of Canada will pay fines totalling over £100 million.
Following an investigation by the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the banks have agreed to pay fines for specific instances in which traders shared competitively sensitive information about aspects of the pricing of UK bonds. The sharing of information occurred in one-to-one exchanges between traders about the buying and selling of gilts and gilt asset swaps.
This conduct took place on various dates between 2009-2013, with the last exchanges occurring in 2010 for HSBC, 2012 for Morgan Stanley, and 2013 for each of Citi, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Canada. Since then, the banks have implemented extensive compliance measures to ensure this behaviour does not happen again.
Each of the exchanges took place in separate bilateral online Bloomberg chatrooms between individual traders at two banks and included information…
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